Microsoft Tries Hard To Play Nice With Open Source, But There's an Elephant In the Room

Esther Schindler writes: They're trying, honest they are. In 2016 alone, writes Steven Vaughan-Nichols, Microsoft announced SQL Server on Linux; integrated Eclipse and Visual Studio, launched an open-source network stack on Debian Linux; and it's adding Ubuntu Linux to its Azure Stack hybrid-cloud offering. That's all well and good, he says, but it's not enough. There's one thing Microsoft could do to gain real open-source trust: Stop forcing companies to pay for its bogus Android patents. But, there's too much money at stake, writes sjvn, for this to ever happen. For instance, in its last quarter, volume licensing and patents, accounted for approximately 9% of Microsoft's total revenue.

Comments

Re:This is big-league ball, kid.

[andydread]

Software patents should be outlawed. The US Supreme Court seems to take a dim view on software patents. Code that allows text to render before images is not innovation. Telling you that I own any code you write that enables a specific feature such as that is not innovation its extortion...legalized extortion. Software patents for simple features like that should have never been applied for and should have never been granted. Microsoft abuses patents on software in an effort to stifle open-source in the marketplace. They have even warned that this is the method they will use against Linux and they have been executing that plan for a while now. It's not just Android it's any device that runs Linux. They have been using fat patents against Linux device makers for a while now. Companies like the NAS maker Buffalo which uses Linux on their devices and have nothing to do with Android has to pay up.

Re:Huh?

[ConceptJunkie]

Microsoft has been threatening Linux with patents for many years. That they are playing hardball with patents against Google is definitely relevant because they could decide to cripple the Linux world by tying it up with patent lawsuits. Even if every one of them were ruled not in Microsoft's favor, they could throw enough money and lawyers at the problem to cripple or destroy any company they wanted to, except other juggernauts like Google, Apple, Samsung, Sony, etc.

So while the Android patents don't directly affect Open Source, they do show that Micosoft could do tremendous amounts of damage to Open Source should it choose.

It's a good sign that MS appears to be trying to play nice with the Open Source world, and to contribute to it as well, but no one can, nor should, forget about the previous 30 years of Microsoft's behavior. They should be earning some good will for these efforts, but there's a long, long way to go before they should earn the trust of the Open Source world, or to even prove that their intention is more than just to put up a screen of "nice" behavior to cover up their more nefarious, ant-competitive practices.